


Midwinter

by kindkit



Category: Discworld - Pratchett
Genre: 10000-30000 words, Age Difference, First Time, M/M, One of My Favorites, Prison, Queer Themes, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-30
Updated: 2009-11-30
Packaged: 2017-10-04 00:16:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stabbing, imprisonment, several awkward conversations, a diplomatic crisis, the art of rhetoric, and many cups of tea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midwinter

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set during and after _The Truth_ and includes spoilers for it.

On the floor of the Oblong Office, a man was unexpectedly not dying.

Rufus Drumknott, the man in question, wasn't aware of doing anything remarkable. He was aware of a pain in his head and another one high on his chest near the left shoulder, of a viscous red puddle he seemed to be lying in, and of a tiny blue flower woven into the carpet pattern. It was much bluer than anything he'd seen actually growing, apart from bread mould. He'd always lived in Ankh-Morpork, whose primary botanical renown was for its fungus.

Perhaps the flower was so blue because it was surrounded by red.

The last available sliver of Drumknott's awareness was taken up by the voice. It came from someone standing over him, and it also seemed to come from past the rim of the world, out in the empty space between the stars. The voice resounded with certainty--not an arrogant certainty, not anything to do with feelings, but the certainty of fact.

And yet what it was saying was: OH DEAR. I WAS SURE THAT THE HOURGLASSES . . . BUT NOW . . . AND THE DOG'S NOT EVEN HERE. I WISH TIME WOULD DECIDE WHAT UNIVERSE ITS TROUSERS ARE IN.

"Trousers?" Drumknott asked. Trousers weren't often discussed in the Oblong Office. His Lordship was a bit old-fashioned on the subject, although not as much as the wizards, who kept demanding a ban on trouser sales within 300 yards of the university.

NEVER MIND. BIT OF A SCHEDULING MIX-UP.

Nonsense. He didn't make mistakes like that. Well, once, but only because he'd confused the two Ridcullys. " . . . nother . . . appoint . . . ?"

NOT JUST YET. NOT FOR SOME TIME, I SEE.

" . . . book?"

YOU WON'T NEED TO WRITE IT DOWN.

Of course he did. Pencil, yes. He'd had one in his hand. He moved his fingers through wetness. Where . . . ? Get up. Get up and find the pencil. Get up now. What would His Lordship say?

Why wasn't His Lordship saying anything?

Shadows gathered around the red edges of Drumknott's vision, blowing in like clouds until there was only black.

***

Later he awoke to find himself being stitched back together by a man whose face inspired confidence. It did so by proving that a quite large amount of stitchery was survivable.

"You're very lucky," the man--the Igor--said brightly, and then explained what would've happened if he'd been stabbed a little to the right (death from a punctured lung or blood vessel) or left (irreparable damage to his shoulder joint). Unpleasant anatomical knowledge churned against Drumknott's various burning, throbbing, piercing pains like waves against a squall-tossed boat, and he retched. Igor gave him something minty to drink for the nausea.

"But what happened?" Drumknott asked, once he could. He was keeping his eyes closed. When he'd tried looking around the room so as not to look at the needle, he'd seen unnameable things bobbing in tanks.

Igor murmured soothingly and went on stitching.

The last thing Drumknott could remember was Lord Vetinari. His Lordship had opened the office door. But he never did that, just said _come in_. Had the door been locked? It oughtn't to have been, with His Lordship inside and at work.

He'd gone in, and there'd been a white flash like lightning in his head. He'd been hit.

Had . . . ? No. No, surely not. He wouldn't. Why would he? It must have been someone else.

Someone like an assassin, or even an Assassin. "Is His Lordship all right? Has anything happened to him?"

"Commander Vimeth will be thpeaking with you thoon. I'm sure he'll exthplain everything."

"Has someone hurt Lord Vetinari? You've got to -"

"Lie thtill." Igor pushed him back the half-inch he'd managed to rise off the hard, chilly slab. "You've torn out a thtitch, and -"

"_Please_."

"Mr. Drumknott," said Commander Vimes from the doorway. "I'm glad you're awake. I've got some -"

"What's happened to His Lordship?"

"I need you to tell _me_ what happened." Vimes stood over him, looking stonier than ever.

"I don't know!" He tried again to sit up, but Igor held him down. "Where is he?"

"He's just down the corridor, relax." Vimes put a heavy hand on his uninjured shoulder, and Igor started in again with the needle on the other one.

"Let me see him."

"You can't just now. He's unconscious."

Drumknott closed his eyes once more and hung onto the slab. It was the only steady thing in the world. Someone put another blanket over him, and Vimes said, "Easy, now. He's probably going to live."

_Probably_ pounded in Drumknott's ears. Prob-ab-ly, three sharp raps, like a hammer on a coffin nail.

"Commander," Igor said, "I think . . . "

"Yeah. Settle him down and I'll try again later."

Footsteps, and a few more sharp stings from the needle, and then Igor held a little vial to his lips. "Drink thith."

He was almost too tired to swallow. "Don't let him die," he said, as his tight-furled pains opened like roses, turning bright and warm. He leaned back into them and slept.

When he woke next, he was lying on a little narrow bed in a little narrow room. At first he thought it was his own room, that he'd overslept and His Lordship would be angry, but by the time he'd located his feet and dragged one out from under the blanket, he remembered. By the time he'd worked the foot under the blanket again, Commander Vimes was there.

"How are you feeling?" Vimes asked.

"Vile." His skull felt like someone had chiselled it open and sandpapered the inside. The culprit had used the same chisel on his shoulder, along with pincers and branding irons, and in fact still seemed to be at it. "How is His Lordship?"

"Still unconscious, but Igor believes he'll recover." Vimes perched on a bit of stone that jutted out from the wall to form a rough table. "It'll take more than a fall off a horse to kill him. A stake through the heart might do the trick, but I wouldn't bet a dollar on it."

What a charming sense of humour. "A horse? But he was in . . . "

"Yes? I need to know what you remember."

"I want to see him."

"Answer my questions first." Slouching, armour off, Vimes was still a human portcullis. There was no getting round him; the only route to His Lordship was compliance. No wonder people didn't like the Watch.

"He was in the office," Drumknott said. (Why had His Lordship got up and opened the door? He'd looked odd, too. Almost nervous.) "I went in at about seven o'clock. I had His Lordship's tea and the morning newspaper. Someone hit me, I suppose. Later I think I came to for a little while, because I remember seeing blood. And something . . . blue? Sorry, it's like trying to remember a dream. I didn't know I'd been stabbed until Igor told me." He almost laughed, saying it, because the words _I_ and _stabbed_ didn't belong together in any reasonable sentence. As an apprentice Drumknott had studied rhetoric manuals, the sort that teach you three hundred ways to say _thank you for the book_, all carefully modulated by rank and circumstance. Elegance for every occasion, they promised, but stabbing-related occasions had been curiously neglected. "I was stabbed," he repeated, and it sounded even stranger.

"Who by?"

_By whom,_ Drumknott thought, clinging to the floating spar of grammar in a sea of doubt. Vimes was an educated man by Watch standards--his reports had most of the commas in the right places--and surely they'd beaten _whom_ into him at dame school. He just enjoyed playing the common man, showing his independence. It was like punching the wall outside the Oblong Office, or joking about His Lordship dying. "I don't know," Drumknott said.

"Was anyone in the office apart from Vetinari?"

"I'm not sure." It was true. It was rhetorically true, just as saying "I am most grateful for your generous and edifying gift of a book" was true thanks even when it really meant "I dislike you intensely but I'm hoping to borrow some money." Drumknott wasn't sure, although he'd seen no one in the visitors' chairs, no one at the conference table. No one but Lord Vetinari, opening the door. Had His Lordship been holding his walking stick? Could he have . . . no. No. The impossibility of the image made Drumknott dizzy. There must have been someone else in the office, at the far end or behind the door; Drumknott had not, after all, _looked_. "There might have been. As I told you, it's all rather blurry."

Vimes asked the same question a few times in different words--a use of rhetoric Drumknott had never envisioned--and finally explained that His Lordship had been found unconscious in the stables with an agitated horse and a saddlebag crammed with dollars.

"That's absurd," Drumknott said.

Vimes looked at him silently, but questions bristled and clawed under the surface like cats in a sack. "I've arrested Vetinari for attempted murder and theft. The evidence against him is . . . well, there's a lot of it."

"_Arrested_? Where is he? You said he's unconscious, you can't -"

"He's in the next cell. Igor's looking after him."

"And what does your Igor know about proper medicine? Has he studied the astrological influences and the balance of the humours? Or does he just play with his needle?"

"He knows not to give purgatives to a man with a head injury, which is more than I can say for doctors!"

"If His Lordship . . . " Drumknott couldn't get the next word out. Not many things are really unspeakable, but this was. If something unspeakable happened to His Lordship . . . oh gods. The best man to rule Ankh-Morpork in a thousand years, he couldn't . . . not alone in a cell like a criminal. It wasn't right. And Commander Vimes was a good man. His Lordship said so. Couldn't he see that it wasn't right? "Please, Your Grace."

"I think I'd better have Igor bring you some more poppy syrup."

"I demand to see him! I'm not under arrest, am I?" For the first time, he noticed exactly what Vimes had said: _the next cell_. He looked carefully but still painfully around the room. It was a very bare room, and dark, with just the one small window set high in the stone wall. Drumknott couldn't see it properly lying down, but he felt sure there were bars on it. The door looked like solid oak and was reinforced with strips of iron. All in all, it could have been the "c is for cell" illustration in some unusually grim alphabet book.

"No, you're not," Vimes said slowly, "but I'm keeping you at the Watch House for your own safety. And you're not getting out of that bed yet because you look like _you_ might die if you tried, and then I'd have to answer to Vetinari for it." A smile appeared on his face, lingered uncomfortably for a moment, and went away. "You needn't worry about us neglecting him. Igor's good at his job. And don't go spreading this around, but I want Vetinari to live."

***

Drumknott's body had become untrustworthy. Like the Ankh, anything might be going on under the surface.

After some hours' drugged sleep and some minutes' pleading with Igor, he'd finally been allowed up to see His Lordship. But the fifteen-foot walk from his bed to the cell next door dredged up a stinking, scummy headache, some rotted bits of wood that used to be his knees and ankles, and sharp-toothed pains that bit unexpectedly and hard. All that from a tap on the head and a knife wound that Igor assured him wasn't half as big as it felt. Surely his legs shouldn't be affected? Of course it was all connected inside. Perhaps injuries flowed downstream, just like the dregs from alchemists and dyers that made the Ankh tend to glow (and occasionally burn) even at the delta where it emptied into a presumably reluctant sea.

Leaning on Igor, Drumknott waited while the troll Watchman took four tries to find the right key.

"Dere he is," the Watchman announced.

His Lordship lay utterly still and white, wrapped in a cheap undyed blanket. Shrouded in it.

"Thteady," said Igor, catching Drumknott round the waist as his knees sagged. "I knew you thouldn't -"

"He's dead."

"He's not," Igor insisted, lisp vanishing. "He's breathing."

"He looks -"

"Come and see."

_He's alive_, Drumknott told his knees, and they took sufficient encouragement from it to cooperate as Igor half-carried him into the cell. _He must be alive, or they'd have taken him away._ Igor pulled back the edge of the blanket and guided Drumknott's fingers to Lord Vetinari's neck. Warm. Alive, with the quick surge and ebb of pulse.

Some of the cold, slimy mud packing Drumknott's chest oozed out through the soles of his feet.

Some remained. "Why doesn't he wake up?" Drumknott noticed he'd been counting His Lordship's pulse beats, and took his hand away.

Igor shrugged, bringing one shoulder momentarily level with the top of his head. "I don't know. But he'th not dying." With his free hand he pinched His Lordship's earlobe, producing a faint groan.

"Don't hurt him!"

"That'th how I know he'th not tho far gone that he'll never regain conthiouthnethth. Pain'th a thign of life."

It was the sort of thing priests said, usually while warming up the pokers, but Drumknott wasn't inclined to distrust it from Igor. He had a practical-seeming mind and no reason to lie. "Let me sit with him." If he could feel pain, he might hear if Drumknott spoke to him. He might be glad not to be alone.

"Sorry," said the troll, still standing in the doorway. Drumknott had heard more elaborate apologies, but seldom one so patently insincere. "No letting dem cook up dere stories together, Mr. Vimes said."

Of course he did. Of course he didn't trust Lord Vetinari. His Lordship had only raised Vimes out of the bottle and the gutter and asked for his help to guard the city, only had faith in something worthy that nobody else could see in the man back then. Only given him a dukedom and a statue of his vicious ancestor, the one who'd thought if you beheaded enough aristocrats and passed enough laws against gambling and dancing, you'd rid the world of injustice. (The statue was right up against the palace, too, so that when you looked out of the window in the Oblong Office the first thing you saw was that damned great sword.) Of course Vimes would return such astonishing faith with an assumption of guilt. That was human nature. If His Lordship were awake to hear it, he wouldn't even be surprised.

"Mr. Vimes can take his ungrateful suspicions and -"

"Thir, you need to retht." Igor took a step towards the door, and Drumknott's knees, with which he was thoroughly disgusted by now, refused to lock against the movement. There was no way not to follow. "I'm looking in on him every few minuteth, I promithe."

Back in his cell, Drumknott asked Igor to move the pillow to the other side of the bed. Vaguely, through the fuddled rebellion that had spread from his knees up to his brain, he suspected he was being foolish and ought to be ashamed. Lying with his head a few feet closer to Lord Vetinari's cell wouldn't help anything except his own irrelevant misery.

Once he was alone, waiting for the latest dose of poppy syrup to take hold, Drumknott brought his mouth close to the wall and whispered, "I know you didn't hurt me, sir."

The words, too quiet to echo, dissipated into nothing as unheard words always did. They made no difference at all.

***

A day and a half in the Watch House so far, and it felt like a holiday. Drumknott had only ever been on one holiday, a cheap tour of Ephebe that he'd paid a month's wages for as a junior clerk, and apart from the cost there was a striking resemblance. The bed was hard, the food had gristly lumps, he felt sick much of the time, and people shouted a lot, usually in the middle of the night. On the other hand, in Ephebe there'd been Sights of Historical Interest, which was Ephebian for lumps of masonry from former temples and palaces that some legendary king had legendarily built, or in some cases legendarily knocked down and set fire to. Here there were just walls, a monotony broken only when Mr. de Worde had come to ask him insinuating questions.

Igor appeared occasionally to say His Lordship still hadn't woken, but seemed closer to it. Drumknott wondered if Lord Vetinari was crawling to consciousness like the ant in the story, crossing half the distance, then half the remaining distance, on and on, always halfway there but never arriving. It was His Lordship who'd told him that story, and smiled wryly and made a joke about paperwork.

Drumknott dozed the hours away in poppy-induced lethargy, did the uncomfortable stretching exercises Igor had taught him, and worried. It was a special kind of worry, the diffuse foggy kind that came from not thinking the unthinkable, and like fog it got everywhere. He worried in his sleep and woke with a sore jaw from grinding his teeth.

In the grey evening of the second day, the creak of rusting hinges woke Drumknott from yet another foggy grey dream. He opened his eyes to see the face of Corporal Nobbs, which was grey only in patches, and was about to close them self-protectively when Nobbs said, "Lord Vetinari's awake, Mr. Drumknott, and he wants to see you."

The fog dissolved and hope glared through, as painful at first as the bad news some part of Drumknott's mind had quietly started to expect. He sat up abruptly, wrenching his wound and making his head throb in cadence with his speeding heart. At least the walk to the cell was easier this time, the prospect of Nobbs's supporting arm giving Drumknott's knees an incentive to get him there without help.

Lord Vetinari, sitting very upright on the edge of the bed, was being harangued by Commander Vimes. "- an epidemic of bad memories at the palace? You don't remember anything, Drumknott doesn't -"

"Drumknott, how glad I am to see you well. Apparently I'm suspected of trying to murder you."

In two days--less than two--he'd forgotten the sound of His Lordship's voice. He blinked hard and clasped his shaking hands together. "Not by me, my lord."

Lord Vetinari looked at him as though he were a half-deciphered message, obscure and possibly rather important. "Good." A nascent smile formed on his lips before he turned to Vimes and let it grow up and become ironic. "If only the Watch shared your faith."

"I don't need faith, sir," Vimes said irritably. "I've got evidence. And all the evidence says you didn't do it. Trouble is, we don't know who did, and without that there'll have to be a trial."

"A trial before the new Patrician, yes," His Lordship's voice was calm, his fingers contemplatively steepled. He wore the manner like a poor man's best coat, trying to disguise too much. His robe was wrinkled, his hair askew, his eyes sunk in bruised-looking skin, his face white and waxen as a death mask. "And then, I imagine, a quiet and extremely brief retirement."

Vimes nodded, then sighed. Without the momentary pleasure of scolding His Lordship to buoy him up, he looked rather tired. "I'll let you know if we find . . . anything, sir. You two can talk a while if you'd like. Corporal Nobbs will take you back to your cell afterwards, Mr. Drumknott."

Drumknott, mind snagged on the barbed realisation that Vimes wasn't going to release His Lordship, didn't even manage a _thank you_.

"Cell?" asked His Lordship when Vimes had gone. As if that were the important thing.

"For my own protection, sir."

"And a solid protection it is, no doubt. Come and sit down, Drumknott, you look ghastly."

Drumknott had been trying to convince himself and the laws of nature that he could lean all his weight on a vertical wall. He made his way cautiously to the bed and tried to think nothing of sitting beside His Lordship like an equal or a friend. There was nowhere else to sit. It was no different from riding in the coach with him. And His Lordship had told him to do it. "Are you really all right, my lord? I thought -"

"I'm sure Commander Vimes would say I was born to hang, and therefore need fear no other death." As he spoke, he draped a blanket over Drumknott's shoulders, managing not to jar the bad one. He was always a careful man, attentive however trivial the problem. "Corporal, a pot of tea, please. Don't forget the sugar. And biscuits."

"Er -" Nobbs looked at Lord Vetinari and somehow shuffled his feet without moving an inch. "Prisoners get tea at mealtimes."

Lord Vetinari said nothing.

"Right, tea. I'll go and get that, sir. Your Lordship." He scurried away, leaving the cell door open.

"Are we going to escape?" Drumknott wondered what use he could be. Perhaps he could distract the Watch by fainting.

"No, we're going to have tea."

"Sweet tea." His Lordship had asked for sugar. He never took sugar. "My mum's - my mother's cure for everything." Gods, he was so addled he was forgetting how to speak like a gentleman. What must His Lordship think?

"Mothers are often very sensible people, I believe," said His Lordship, as though he hadn't noticed a thing. That was a true gentleman.

"I'm sorry, sir."

"Whatever for?"

Bits of words assembled in Drumknott's mind like a half-solved crossword, but there were no clues and he couldn't guess what they ought to be. "This."

"Mr. Drumknott, are you apologising for being stabbed?" Lord Vetinari looked closely at him and frowned. "That's a sort of arrogance, you know. I insist on keeping the responsibility myself."

"Sorry."

"Do be quiet."

Gratefully, Drumknott was quiet. Doing something for His Lordship--and such a simple thing, tempered to his very limited capabilities at the moment--set the world partway to rights. He propped his muddled head on his hands, closed his eyes, and didn't open them again until the sound of footsteps and the smell of Nobbs approached.

Nobbs left the tray on a stone table like the one in Drumknott's cell. It was out of his reach, but when he started to lean forward His Lordship cleared his throat in a distinctly quelling manner. So he sat and let himself be served tea by his master. There was a topsy-turvy pleasure in seeing Lord Vetinari's elegant hands holding the same kind of cheap teapot that Drumknott's family had used.

Four spoonfuls of sugar went into a mug with _Welcomm! to Ankh-Morpork_ written on the side, which Lord Vetinari handed to him. "Thank you, sir." Drumknott had stopped taking sugar in his tea when he'd read that cultured people didn't, but he'd never lost the taste for sweets. Anyway, it was like medicine, as everyone's mother (and His Lordship) knew.

"You seem better already." A smile briefly brightened his drawn face. "But do drink it. I know _I'll_ feel better when you stop shivering."

He hadn't noticed he was shivering, but the warmth of the tea--nastily bitter even through the sugar, the Watch must have lead-lined stomachs--was nearly the best thing he'd felt in two days. Lord Vetinari nodded, brushed at the smudges on a biscuit, and gave him that as well. "It should be edible enough. I don't believe any of Corporal Nobbs's . . . personal misfortunes are contagious." He poured tea for himself--the other mug said _Seamstresses Do It To Order_\--sipped at it, and winced.

"Sir," Drumknott asked after he'd drunk a mug and a half of the revolting tea and eaten two biscuits, "Do you know what actually happened?" Drumknott had long since understood that some of His Lordship's perfect foresight was really improvisation. But at the worst moments, His Lordship always did know. He'd been locked up before, over that business with Leshp, but only to wait for the solution he knew was coming.

"Let us say that I have a theory. It's a rather outlandish theory that I cannot yet prove." He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, a gesture Drumknott had never seen before. "Wuffles is missing, did they tell you that?"

"No, sir. I'm sure he'll -" No, Drumknott wasn't at all sure he'd be all right, a pampered old dog unprotected on Ankh-Morpork streets. And His Lordship wouldn't take comfort from a polite lie. "I'm sorry."

"The Watch are looking for him, of course. They've even put his picture in the _Times_."

The tea, or maybe the proximity of His Lordship's analytical mind, had got Drumknott's almost functioning. It took him a few seconds, but he sorted this information out. "He's the proof. He's a witness. That werewolf, Sergeant von Uberwald - they're going to question Wuffles. But will that be enough?"

"We shall find out. I hope." Lord Vetinari sighed again and glanced at the cell door, which Corporal Nobbs had closed after bringing the tea. "Being in a prison that I don't have the key to is most educational. I've learnt that I don't like it at all."

***

What Drumknott was trying to think of neutrally as An Odour rose up from beside the Patrician's desk. In the days since they'd been back, Wuffles had been permitted a rich diet of dog biscuits and C. M. O. T. Dibbler's sausages, which he'd somehow got a taste for while homeless. Drumknott didn't begrudge him the treat but was more eager than usual for spring, when the window could be opened wide and the general stench of Ankh-Morpork might, with luck, drown out the particular stench of elderly and indulged dog.

His Lordship, long accustomed to Wuffles's more pungent traits, finished signing a stack of wage chitties. "Is that the last of the extra payments?"

"Yes, sir." Wages, like everything else, had got behind, and the backlog had doubled when His Lordship decided to award small bonuses to everyone who'd held off civil collapse by staying on the job. Astonishingly, that was almost three-quarters of the city's payroll and the entirety of the Watch.

"Good. It's a necessary expense, but at this rate I might have to start asking the guilds to pay their taxes."

"There's a report from the head of the Exchequer on that very subject, sir."

"I'm sure it will make most enlightening reading." Lord Vetinari pinched the bridge of his nose, facial muscles going tight in a repressed yawn. He was working even harder than usual, and he probably still got headaches; Drumknott certainly did. "But later. Drumknott, there is a matter that needs your special attention. I'm thinking of reorganising the apprentice clerks' training. Did you know they're still taught to write four different varieties of Uberwaldian Gothic minuscule, even though everyone in Uberwald has used Quirmian script for a hundred and fifty years?"

"Yes, sir." The memory made his hand cramp.

"Well, as I'm frequently informed by the likes of Mr. de Worde, this is nearly the Century of the Anchovy. Ankh-Morpork doesn't need calligraphers, excellent though the skill is in itself. The apprentices require proper training in modern languages, accounting, those squiggles of yours -"

"Shorthand, sir."

"Yes. Even things like how to code a clacks transmission when one needs to be sent discreetly. Your sort of knowledge, Drumknott."

Oh, gods. Drumknott had seen enough people being manoeuvred that he couldn't fail to recognise it now. "Sir -"

"It needs an expert to design the course of study and supervise the teachers. He wouldn't be required to do much actual teaching himself. Perhaps ciphers and such with a few of the older apprentices. What do you think?"

There had to be something behind this. Lord Vetinari set him little puzzles sometimes, leaving things unexplained to see what he could deduce. So: proceed as though the question isn't loaded. "I believe modernisation is an excellent idea, sir. Mr. Neblett would do a very good job of it."

His Lordship flashed one of those bright smiles Drumknott knew well, the ones he used on people who were, in one way or another, a problem. "Perhaps I've been unclear. The position is yours, Drumknott, and I'm sure you'll acquit yourself well."

Drumknott turned the sentence over in his mind, gave it a hearty shake, searched its pockets and the lining of its coat, and found not a trace of ambiguity. "I'd prefer to continue working directly for you, sir."

"Consider it a promotion." He had stopped smiling, thank all the gods, even the doubtfully relevant ones. "The salary's no higher, since given the nature of your work for me you're already rather well paid. But I can attach a very dignified title to the job. Master of Clerks, perhaps? And since I won't need you close at hand, you can move out of that ridiculous little room behind your office. There are some large and comfortable suites on the third floor, I believe."

Rooms and a title. Did His Lordship really think fripperies would sway him? "It's not a promotion, my lord. And I don't want it." It was exile, a comfortable exile of planning lessons and ordering boys about, while the real work continued without him. While someone else would stand here in his place, close at His Lordship's hand.

"Drumknott, you were nearly killed." Something in the evenness of His Lordship's tone hinted that he might, if he were anyone else, have raised his voice.

"I know, sir." Some nights the thought of it kept him awake, however tired he was. Some nights the knowledge taunted him through mazy dreams of too many unfinished things and not enough time.

"I should not like a recurrence."

A gust of relief--His Lordship was worried, not displeased--blew down all of Drumknott's proper deference. "You were rather more nearly killed than I, my lord. Do you plan to promote yourself out of being Patrician?"

Both narrow black eyebrows went up, and for an instant His Lordship's face was pure surprise. "While we were at the Watch House, did you happen to have many conversations with Commander Vimes?"

"No, sir."

"How odd. You seem to have acquired some of his habits. Perhaps it's something they put in the tea, which would explain the taste. Well, if you insist on presenting yourself as a target for conspirators--and may I remind you that whoever planned these recent difficulties remains undiscovered?--I shan't stop you."

"Thank you, sir." He was smiling too much, but his face refused his orders to stop. Perhaps it had been talking to Vimes in secret.

"What do you think of young Reavish's work?"

Reavish had filled in for three days while Drumknott was still feeling too weak. Perhaps it was he Lord Vetinari had had in mind as a new secretary. "Excellent," Drumknott said warily. "He writes a good plain hand and an even better formal one." The latter was possibly superior to Drumknott's own, more effortless in its graceful flourishes. A little showy, some might say. "Of course, he's inexperienced. He drafted a letter to the mayor of Pseudopolis that said exactly what you'd told him, sir. Word for word. Fortunately I spotted it before it was brought to you for signing."

"He can gain experience. And he will. I'm making him your assistant." His Lordship's smile this time had something toothily triumphant around the edges, a reminder that when one of his plans was thwarted, he always had another. "I'm sure he can manage fair copies and such tedium. As for you--since you're so fond of city business, I'll draw you into more of it. Get your cloak."

"Sir?"

"We're going to visit the offices of the _Times_," Lord Vetinari said, picking up his walking stick and leaning hard on it to push himself upright. This bitter weather had brought back the limp he'd otherwise almost lost. "I should like to say 'thank you' to Mr. de Worde."

"And a few other things as well, sir?"

His Lordship bent down abruptly to give Wuffles a farewell pat. "Perhaps."

***

By the time he got to Number 30, Little Henswell Street, Drumknott was slightly out of breath from walking fast in the cold. He stood exhaling clouds and looking at the old brass door handle in the shape of a sheep's head. It was brightly polished and the door freshly painted, as was the sign: _Arthur Drumknott and Son, Clothiers_. For some years it had really just been Son, but Tobias said it would be foolish to change a name customers knew, and no doubt he was right. His Lordship said the same thing, more or less: people want tomorrow to be the same as today.

Drumknott knocked, and Tobias's voice called "Who's there?" from behind a shuttered upstairs window.

"It's Rufus."

A minute later, after the clunk and rattle of several heavy locks, Tobias opened the door with a smile. "Come in, come in. Sorry about that. You wouldn't believe the times we've had foreigners knocking on Octeday, not knowing the shop would be closed."

Drumknott followed him back through the dim space crowded with fabric bolts and smelling of wool, dyes, cedar, and the beeswax that kept the floors and countertops gleaming. As a boy he'd sat here every day after school, fetching and carrying for his father and doing his lessons when there was a lag. At eleven he'd won his apprenticeship to the Clerks' Guild and been pleased to go, but breathing the shop air always felt like stepping back into childhood. Like pulling the bedclothes high and drowsing in comfortable darkness, knowing he could pop his head out again before he stifled.

As he climbed the stairs behind Tobias, the smell changed to roasting pork and turf smoke, which his sister-in-law Jane thought was more homely than coal. "It's good to see you, Rufus," she said, flushed pink from bending over the oven's open door to baste the joint. The kitchen was almost hot. Drumknott stretched his hands out over the stove and tried to rub away the chill of the palace and the streets. "It's been far too long." She kissed his cheek and gave him a cup of tea.

"It has, I know." In theory he had Octedays free, and a half-day Sunday, but it didn't feel right taking so much when His Lordship was always working. "Paperwork's like baling a boat, you daren't stop or you'll drown. And there's been a lot to catch up on after the . . . recent incident."

A look passed like a clacks message between Jane and Tobias, who was hanging Drumknott's cloak on a peg by the door. "How are you?" Tobias asked, eyeing up Drumknott's left side. "We got your note but I wasn't sure how much of 'not badly hurt' to believe."

"I'm perfectly fine, I promise. It turns out the Watch have an . . . a very good doctor. My arm's still a trifle stiff, that's all."

Another message flashed in the secret code of married people. Drumknott was used to deciphering His Lordship's moods and expressions, but he hadn't the skill for this. He ignored them and sat down at the table next to Hugh, who was so lost in a book that he'd barely looked up when Drumknott came in. "What are you reading?"

Eyes fixed to the page, Hugh tilted the book, showing a familiar faded green cover with a water stain at the bottom. It had been Drumknott's once, part of an auction lot that his father had bought cheap after Phinazee's Secondhand Books went bankrupt. When he'd begged his parents for more books, he hadn't expected a random trunkful, most of which turned out to be things like _Your Horoscope For the Year of the Dyspeptic Ocelot_ and _Tempting Turnips!: 800 Recipes to Suit the Modest Budget_. But he'd loved _The Mysterious Agatean World_, even though the book had been written in the last century and was more than a touch fanciful. All that folderol about the Agateans inventing fireworks, for instance, when everyone knew Ankh-Morpork had _always_ had fireworks. And it said the first Agatean Emperor had been a dragon . . . come to think of it, that was a lot more believable now than it had seemed in his boyhood.

"What's your favourite part?" he asked.

"The empress discovering that silk comes from caterpillars," Hugh answered without even stopping to think. "When I grow up I'm going to sneak into the empire and steal all the caterpillars I can find. Then I'll come home and get rich."

The true Ankh-Morpork spirit. Drumknott hoped that in ten years he wouldn't be explaining to His Lordship how Hugh had managed to start a war with the most powerful country on the Disc.

Lunch went as it always did: he ate rather too much, listened to the family news, and said, when asked, that he was healthy, sleeping well, not overworked, and that he'd heard absolutely nothing about whether His Lordship ever intended to lower the (extremely small) tariff on Lancre wool. After the figgy dowdy and a few more of those coded looks between Tobias and Jane, Hugh was chivvied off to finish his sums for school. Jane made another pot of tea, while Tobias rested his hands thoughtfully on his belly, which had been growing prosperously year by year and now made a convenient shelf.

"All right," Drumknott said. "What is it?"

Tobias grinned, looking suddenly twelve years old and eager to help his little brother find the sugar eggs on Soul Cake Tuesday. "The shop's doing well, so well that we want to open another one. A posh one. _Everybody's_ doing well, and they want to look it. There's money in good fabrics. Fine wools, velvet, silk. Especially silk. We've been talking about it, that's why Hugh's got silkworms on the brain."

"I'm pleased for you."

"To expand, though," Tobias said, stirring sugar and milk into his tea, "I'd need help. A man I could trust."

Drumknott began to think he'd had this conversation before.

"Dad always wanted to bring you into the business," Tobias continued. "But there wasn't enough money in it, not then."

"But -"

"Day you went off to 'prentice, he cried. Only time I ever saw him crying, except when Mum died." He reached for Jane's hand and held it.

Drumknott looked at their faces, full of love and goodwill, and felt like a creature somewhat lower on the chain of being than a silkworm. "I don't know anything about cloth. Only what I learnt as a little boy, and I've forgotten half that."

"I know cloth, and I'll teach you. But what _I_ need's what you know already. Figuring, of course--dunno where I'd be without you doing the tax form every year. And you've got those palace manners. Nothing pries open a fat wallet like a compliment or two, nice and poetic in a posh accent. And you know Klatchian. If I could send letters to Klatchian merchants, make my deals direct with them instead of those cheating bastards of ship owners, I'd get better silks and cheaper too."

Tobias had worked out his future even more thoroughly than Lord Vetinari had. And like His Lordship, Tobias had thought of almost everything. "I'm happy in my job," Drumknott said.

Tobias and Jane exchanged another covert look. This one Drumknott could read by its effects; Tobias shrugged and Jane undertook the next part of the deliberation. "You'd be your own man, not taking orders. Not somebody's clerk."

His own man. Flattering rich merchants' wives and daughters so they'd pay to be the gaudiest creatures at this year's guild dinner. Minding his own business, narrowing his world to shop walls and ledger entries, becoming a tiny, replaceable gear in Ankh-Morpork's clockwork. Knowing nothing of the city, nothing of His Lordship except what everyone knew.

Why would he ever want to be his own man when he could be Lord Vetinari's?

"- a real future," Jane was saying. "Something to build on. You'll be thinking of marriage before long, I expect, and you can't keep a wife in a room at the palace."

"I've no wish to marry."

"You will someday," Tobias said, smiling at Jane and obviously wishing his brother the same happiness. He was as generous and as blinkered as an opera enthusiast who's sure that what his friends really want for Hogswatch is season tickets.

Drumknott said, "I'm grateful to you both," and wished he'd phrased it differently when he saw their delighted faces. "I'm sorry I can't accept. It's a good plan, Tobias. Good enough to wait a few years until Hugh's of an age to help." Always end on cheerful news when possible, he thought, and added, "By the way, most Klatchian merchants can read Morporkian. You don't need me to write letters."

Tobias shook his head, and Jane said, "How can you serve that man after what he did to you?"

"What?"

"And your shoulder still pains you, anyone can -"

"Do you think -? It wasn't him! The _Times_ worked it all out, didn't you see?"

"Oh, I saw what the _Times_ worked out, all right." Tobias crossed his arms, frowning. "A pair of foreign killers, both dead before anybody could ask questions, and some fellow from Pseudopolis who just happens to look like his nibs's long-lost twin. All in the pay of the gods know who. And the whole business testified to by the only eyewitness, Vetinari's dog. I've heard likelier stories when Jane used to read fairy tales to our Hugh."

"You can't think that His Lordship -"

"I bloody well can. The _Times_ indeed. Do you know who that William de Worde is? Him who runs it? He's Lord de Worde's son. He's a toff just like Vetinari, and they all stick together."

Even if Drumknott could tell him what His Lordship had surmised about Lord de Worde, he knew the truth didn't have a chance. Against gossip, things-everyone-knew, and the commonest of common sense, it stood like an Omnian missionary in the Mended Drum: not for very long. "You must see it's ridiculous. Seventy thousand dollars in the saddlebags, when His Lordship's a rich man in his own right? And if he wanted to steal from the city, he could do it without ever leaving the palace. Just like Lord Snapcase did, and Winder, and all the other ones who wanted to loot instead of build."

There was a pause. Thought seemed to pull hidden cords and levers behind Tobias's placid face. He sighed and stared down at the table. "I'm not a fool, Rufus. I saw that for myself. I know what he did wasn't on account of money."

"Why, then? Do you imagine he had a sudden whim to flee the city he's given his whole life to?"

"Well . . . " Tobias said, still not looking at him.

Jane, however, met his gaze determinedly. "There might have been a . . . a quarrel."

"A quarrel? Between _His Lordship_ and _me_?" Faced with this tidal wave of absurdity, Drumknott tried to retreat up the hill of reason.

"He's used to having his own way, Vetinari is." Tobias's face was red, his voice reluctant. "Not a man to like hearing _no_."

"But . . . " Absurdity crested and broke over him. It was more than absurd, it was _lurid_, like those cheap Quirmian novels that pretended not to be pornography. What a scenario: the tyrant's ruthless lust, the innocent victim stabbed for refusing. "How can you think such a thing?"

"There are stories. How he made the Seamstresses' Guild start letting in the what-d'ye-call-ems -"

_Tailor boys_, Drumknott thought, and didn't say a word.

"- letting _men_ in, anyway -" Jane shushed him and he lowered his voice. "They say he goes to that so-called club on his nights off -"

What nights off?

"- and it's always the young ones he picks, two or three at once sometimes, and he doesn't even pay because he says they owe him. And there you are under his nose all day, hardly more than a lad, and--well, I'll speak plain, Rufus--anybody can see that you think he hung the stars and taught the Turtle how to fly. So maybe I'm not so ridiculous to fear he might try and take advantage." He patted Drumknott's forearm and said gently, "No shame to you if he did."

"Tobias -"

"Maybe he was sorry afterwards. Those servants saw him crying over you, saying how sorry he was. But you can't trust a man like that. He doesn't deserve your loyalty."

_There ought to be a word_, Drumknott thought, _for this moment when you're overwhelmed with love for someone whom, simultaneously and no less overwhelmingly, you want to hit on the head with a truncheon_. "Tobias. Jane." He realised he was rubbing at his left shoulder and made himself stop. "I'm sorry you've feared for me. But you're wrong. His Lordship has never done anything to harm me. He wouldn't."

Tobias pushed his mug scrapingly across the tabletop and slumped back in his chair. His mouth had curled up around what Drumknott knew were a lot of unsaid words. It was Jane who eventually spoke. "Of course, Rufus." She gave him a long and oddly motherly look, the sort Hugh probably got when he prattled about sailing to the Agatean Empire to steal silkworms. "Well. Did you hear that the Huckinses are having another baby? She seems pleased enough, though they have got five already. And Eileen Roal's _daughter_ wants to join the Watch, would you credit it?"

After that, the afternoon creaked along, inadequately oiled by gossip and mulled wine. Just before dark Drumknott walked back to Old Snead Avenue to get a cab. A heavy sleet was falling, slicking the cobblestones and forming pinheads of ice on his cloak, and all the cabmen seemed to have gone home. He should have left early himself, but Tobias and Jane might have thought he was offended, and that would've given the whole business too much weight.

If Lord Vetinari were like some previous Patricians, it wouldn't have been so risible. But His Lordship was as chaste as the heroine of a Quirmian novel, not as debauched as the villain. Perhaps that was why the rumours were so many and so scurrilous: like chameleons, they fed on air. In all these years, His Lordship had touched Drumknott once, and that was to shake his hand the day he was promoted to secretary. His Lordship seemed fond enough of him, true. There were little smiles, little jokes and confidences. But if His Lordship had ever wanted more than that, there had never been a hint. Even when they'd worked late, utterly alone in the sleeping palace, and Drumknott had wearily indulged a chameleon hope.

If His Lordship had ever wanted him . . . how could he have asked, being who he was, knowing it might be taken for an order? Perhaps Tobias's notion was so perfectly false that it reflected truth backwards, like a mirror.

How could Lord Vetinari ask _anyone_ to his bed? No doubt there were people who hadn't waited to be asked, who'd asked His Lordship instead. But out of the throngs who might seduce him for favour, information, a plot, an assassination, whom could he ever dare to accept?

And so the greatest man on the Disc slept alone. He played Thud by clacks with someone in Uberwald and he walked in the palace gardens with his dog.

_I never thought. I never thought of this._ If it hadn't been so cold, Drumknott might have gone back to Tobias's house to thank him.

A few minutes later, a muffled guard let him through the palace gates. Hurrying across the courtyard, he saw, as he had expected, the lighted window of the Oblong Office. His Lordship was probably reading intelligence reports, which he liked to do on Octedays because he didn't have meetings to interrupt his thinking. That was as close as he got to resting: no meetings and the big, extra-difficult Octeday crossword. Sometimes he reminded Drumknott of those poor girls at the hemp manufactory who'd been kept chained to their stations until His Lordship found out and put a stop to it.

Drumknott slipped quietly past the closed door of the Oblong Office and into his own, hung up his cloak, and started brewing a pot of tea. The Oblong Office was terrible in weather like this. It was too big to heat even if His Lordship hadn't seemed to prefer keeping it and the other public rooms uncomfortable. From Ember to March, committee meetings became wonderfully brief and efficient.

When the tea was ready, he took the tray through the connecting door. His Lordship, a narrow line of darkness from his black skullcap to the black boots just visible under the edge of his black robe, stood looking out of the window. He was alone; he must have dismissed Reavish for the night. "Good evening, Drumknott," he said without turning around. He was, Drumknott saw, using his stick, which ordinarily he dispensed with unless he would be walking far.

"Good evening, sir. I've brought you some tea." He leaned over the snoring Wuffles to set the tray down.

"It is still your day off, you know."

"Yes, my lord."

"Well, thank you. Please have some yourself if you wish."

Drumknott fetched a second cup from his office and poured for them both, then, deciding His Lordship's words had been an invitation, joined him at the window. Snow had begun, fat flakes meandering lazily down. They were so pretty that it took an effort of mind to connect them with the several thousand poor people who'd died of cold this winter. Drumknott was, however, cheered to see an icicle forming on the bronze nose of Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes.

"How are your brother and his family?" Lord Vetinari asked. "Or did you go elsewhere today?"

The last was mere politeness; Drumknott was sure that if he hadn't gone to Tobias's house, His Lordship would have noticed, if only from the missing scent of turf smoke on his clothes. "They're well, sir, thank you." Since His Lordship seemed in a talking mood, he added, "My brother offered me a job."

"Indeed? It seems you are much in demand."

Drumknott realised he had perhaps overlooked something. "Er . . . was that by any chance your idea, sir?"

"Not at all. I have accepted your decision to remain with me. May I assume it is unaltered?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." He smiled over the rim of the teacup. "I cannot see you as a shopkeeper." His long fingers cradled the cup, warming themselves, ignoring the handle and the rules of etiquette.

_You feel the cold as much as anyone_, Drumknott thought. _But how you pretend otherwise._ "Nor can I, my lord," he said, and smiled back.

***

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Lord Vetinari asked, looking up from a report.

Drumknott had answers at hand for all the likely questions, such as the names of the Royal Mail employees, the current arrears in their wages, and the year of the last known delivery. He was unprepared for ghosts. "I've never seen one, my lord. But then I've never seen A'Tuin, either. A'Tuin's existence, however, is demonstrated by trained astronomers, while no such evidence exists for ghosts. I would say I am uncertain about them."

"The central post office is said to be haunted. I shouldn't think it a logical destination for the unquiet dead, unless they're trying to find out where their letters have gone." He leaned back, two fingers to his lips, thinking. "Arrange an appointment tomorrow with Mr. Mutable from the Exchequer. He's done good work there, he needs a challenge."

"Yes, sir. Will half past five do?" It was the only free space, unless he rescheduled Lord Downey, who was touchy about that sort of thing.

"That's fine." Lord Vetinari opened another file and stared at the first page. His eyes didn't move, so he wasn't reading. After a few seconds he shifted in the chair and stretched his bad leg. "I want to walk a bit. Come with me, would you? Bring a few of the more entertaining letters. I believe there's one from the League of Decency." He picked up his walking stick and snapped his fingers at Wuffles, who was asleep under a blanket cut down from one of His Lordship's old cloaks. The dog opened his eyes, whined, and shut them again. He slept a lot these days. His Lordship looked down at him, face scoured of any expression Drumknott could recognise, and then turned sharply away.

Drumknott, reading out a letter as best he could in the intermittent light from the cressets, followed him through the anteroom, the map room, an old games room now used for the clacks archive, a brutally cold sunroom that was all glass on two sides, and a curiosities room packed with fascinating cabinets that Drumknott seldom had time to examine. They went up two flights of stairs to the top storey, in and out of a series of rooms containing nothing but dust, and down again one flight. The great silent bell of the university tolled eight long emptinesses as they walked.

If ghosts were anywhere in Ankh-Morpork, Drumknott thought, they were here. Dead kings and Patricians; murdered wives, mistresses, children, elder brothers, younger brothers; everyone who'd been starved in the dungeons or beheaded in the courtyard; everyone who'd experienced the remarkably specialised bits of old ironmongery in dank little rooms far below the ground. The palace, historically considered, might be the most crime-ridden corner of the city. No doubt the likes of Commander Vimes would say "Burn it down," and perhaps that wasn't such a bad idea. His Lordship's life would be more pleasant in a reasonably-sized house on Scoone Avenue with good fireplaces and no bloodstains in the mortar. But a symbol was a symbol.

At least the hitch in His Lordship's step had eased a little; he even smiled when Drumknott mentioned that the League of Decency's letter spelt "prurient" with a "w." Outside an ordinary-looking door, he stopped and said, "I'm going to get something warmer to wear." Drumknott counted doors--it was the sixth along from the turnwise staircase--and realised this was His Lordship's bedroom. The Watch had moved him here during the arsenic incident and he hadn't bothered to return to the old one. "The problem appears to stem from letting the muscles get cold. You can go back to the office; I'll return momentarily."

Between His Lordship's fingers, Drumknott saw the silver death's-head that topped the walking stick. He thought of ghosts, and suddenly knew why His Lordship had chosen it. It was a memento mori. In miniature, in a grim and fearless joke, it figured the death that shadowed His Lordship. Death had ripped his body too much ever to mend entirely; it had even come into his bedroom disguised as light. It never left him, and so he'd echoed it in a form that would serve him.

Drumknott felt his own memories ache in his chill-stiff shoulder, and he reckoned that one death was enough for any man. "Are you in pain, sir? I could -" _Oh no_, he thought. _No, not like this. I was going to await a promising opportunity, not go blundering in. I was going to be ready and know what to say._ But death brushed coldly against him from all sides, whispered in his ear, and he was too unnerved to wait. "I could, well, massage your leg for you. If you like."

There was a silence, primordially absolute, and then a thud Drumknott recognised as his own heart beating. It beat twice more before His Lordship said, "Do you mean . . . yes, you do." He looked nonplussed by the universe, as though he'd found a whale in his bathtub. "I never imagined your regard for me was quite so comprehensive."

A tardy modesty heated Drumknott's face. As it had come too late to do any good, he ignored it. "It is, sir. It has been for a long time."

"Good gods, why?" A sort of double shrug, shoulder and puzzled eyebrows, weighted the question. Drumknott still felt distinctly cetacean, but at least His Lordship hadn't laughed or got angry. "I'm twice your age. And I've never been what anyone would call handsome."

Passing over the complex issue in favour of the simpler, if more carnal, one, Drumknott said, "You have beautiful hands. Artist's hands." Lord Vetinari glanced doubtfully at them, then went back to studying Drumknott's face. His head was slightly tilted and he blinked even less than usual. "And blue eyes with dark lashes. You're what I would call handsome."

"With a sensibility like that, Mr. Drumknott, you ought to choose a true artist. A poet, perhaps, to write you sonnets."

What Drumknott normally thought of as his intelligence told him to apologise and slink quietly away. But that would save nothing. Having embarrassed them both, he'd find himself teaching apprentice clerks after all, or selling Klatchian silks. The only choice was to venture on, so he dismissed intelligence and called stupidity and boldness to his aid. "I can't imagine anyone ever writing me poetry, sir. But I'm immensely flattered that you disagree."

"Spoken like a politician! Did you learn that from me?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Alas the day," Lord Vetinari said. "In any case, it's I who should be flattered. And I am. But I'm not made to be anyone's lover. I'm not a kind man." His voice and face were the very image of sternness. Even . . . even the very iconograph, formed of light and shadow, paper and ink, without solidity. There was a faint quality of _pose_.

"You've always been kind to me. You gave me tea and biscuits when we were in gaol."

"Tea and biscuits? Are you offering yourself to me on the basis of tea and biscuits?"

"No, sir. On the basis of . . . everything."

"Yes, I see. My irresistible charms, my gentle nature, the peace and security I can offer, the comfort of marriage, children, and respectability. You're right, I am an excellent choice."

"By gods, none of that had occurred to me." It wasn't a wise way to speak to His Lordship, but he'd sent wisdom packing some minutes ago.

"Mr. Drumknott." Lord Vetinari ran a hand through his hair, dislodging his black cap, which he shoved into a pocket. "You are not listening to me."

"I am, sir. Most attentively." The thing that Drumknott had half-perceived throughout the conversation--because he _had_ been listening, the way Lord Vetinari listened to ambassadors and guildmasters--clarified in his mind, and he understood why he hadn't given up. "In fact, I've been listening particularly to what you didn't say."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You haven't said no, my lord. You haven't said you don't want me."

"Would it do any good to say so now?"

"I would be inclined to disbelieve you."

Lord Vetinari sighed heavily and shook his head. "I have always preferred the diplomatic evasion to the outright lie."

"I know, sir."

"As it happens, every word I've spoken to you is true. There must be ten thousand men in this city who'd be a better match for you. To say nothing of women." He hesitated, as if he believed Drumknott might change his mind and run off after the nearest pair of breasts. "But I find that the thought of . . . of a connexion between us is not unappealing."

It would never make a sonnet; a memorandum, perhaps. But there were, after all, three hundred ways of saying _thank you for the book_. "You hid it well, sir," Drumknott said.

"Of course I did. But not, it would seem, perfectly." The corners of his mouth lifted so slightly that anyone without Drumknott's years of close observation would have missed it. "In the circumstances, I think you'd better call me Havelock."

The other people who used that name had never been invited to. They insinuated with it, or pushed. They thought it gave them power, that they were His Lordship's equals because they'd been at school with him, or had a title, or because their fathers had known his. "Havelock," Drumknott said, and the sound of it almost frightened him.

"Rufus," Havelock looked at him with solemn and deep attention. He turned the knob on the door and let it fall open. "Will you come in?"

Simple words, clearly spoken. Drumknott spent a few long seconds thinking he'd somehow misunderstood them. He nodded, eventually, and followed Havelock into the room. It was no larger than Drumknott's own, but much emptier.

"Have you got a match? I'd rather not ring for a servant just now."

The first match went out in Drumknott's unsteady hand. With the second, he managed to light a tall white candle. They still came from Carry's; His Lordship hadn't wanted to bankrupt the widow. Drumknott wondered how he could stand the smell of beeswax. "The last time I was here," he said, the words jagged in his throat, "I thought you were dying."

"So did I, for a day or two." Havelock was standing at the head of the bed and very definitely not looking at it. Was it the same bed? Probably. Havelock was a practical man. "You quarrelled with Commander Vimes, I think. I remember your voices."

"He sent me away." Drumknott came closer.

"He has a suspicious nature," said Havelock, and touched his cheek with cold fingers.

Drumknott caught him round the neck and kissed him fiercely. He got a shock of impressions--the suede rub of beard, chapped lips, a quick startled breath--before Havelock pulled back, lifting his free hand to Drumknott's face again. It moulded itself around the planes of his bones and glided along his skin, then moved to his hair, palming the surface, running strands between his fingers. "How extraordinary."

_Poet_, Drumknott thought, but only leaned his head into Havelock's cupping palm, kissing the pad under his thumb. He closed his eyes, which Havelock seemed to take as a request. He stroked Drumknott's brows and eyelids, even drew a finger across the edge of his eyelashes. He touched Drumknott's lips next, tracing their shape. Drumknott waited to be kissed, and was not. Instead, Havelock started opening the clasps at the neck of his robe, deftly one-handed. It tickled his throat, and the icy air seemed to have fingers of its own seeking him out.

"You're cold. Perhaps we ought to get into bed. It is the preferred location for such matters, I believe."

"Let's," said Drumknott. Havelock stepped back from him, clumsily, and Drumknott remembered that his leg was hurting.

He wondered if he should undress. Havelock wasn't doing so, merely watching him with that blank face that meant focused attention. Drumknott pried off his boots less gracefully than he would have liked--he couldn't bring himself to sit on the bed to do it, even if he had been asked into the bed in the first place--and slid between the unwarmed, unwelcoming sheets. His robe twisted around his knees, and he had to heave himself against the cold wall to make room for Havelock, who did sit down for boot-removal.

There was always, Drumknott supposed, a tinge of disappointment in getting anything you deeply wanted. The hope got dragged backwards through the hedge between fantasy and reality and came out scratched. Came out as a freezing room and a penitentially narrow bed instead of something silky and effortless. Then again--the mattress shifted as Havelock lay next to him and pulled the covers over them both--there was much to be said for the realm of fact. For the creases along Havelock's forehead and the smoky tea on his breath, the circle of thinning hair his skullcap normally hid, the way their knees bumped whenever they moved.

"Comfortable?"

"Yes," Drumknott said, and inched away from the wall to make it true.

Havelock touched his face again, palm cradling his jaw, nails scraping lightly at the hint of stubble there. "You're less boyish than I had thought."

"I'm twenty-six." Drumknott let the back of his hand rest against Havelock's chest. The robe was thick, and there must be more layers beneath it, but he could just feel the flat hard surface of the body under everything. His fingers itched for it.

"I know. But you look almost beardless, being so fair." His hand dropped to Drumknott's neck, teasing inside the collar he had undone. His fingers were still cold, but Drumknott's skin mysteriously translated the touch to warmth; he felt the flow of it with every tiny movement. "Does this give you pleasure? You expressed a certain admiration for my hands, earlier."

Drumknott watched his lips shape the words. A few inches closer and they'd be kissing. "Very much so," he said.

"Good. I shall continue, then." One hand settled into Drumknott's hair; the other explored his torso through his clothes, unhurried as Drumknott's breathing quickened and his fist tightened around a handful of Havelock's robe.

_Kiss me_, Drumknott thought as Havelock's fingers curved over his hip, but he lost the words in a chaos of heat and amazement. He lost even the wish as the hand slipped under his robe, over breeches and waistcoat, working between buttons to dart along the bare skin of his chest. When he was quivering, arching into every touch, Havelock swiftly unfastened his flies and eased his hand--really warm now even to Drumknott's burning flesh--inside.

"Don't turn your face away, Rufus." Havelock drew his head up from the pillow where he'd muffled his whimper. "Let me see how I'm pleasing you." On _pleasing_ his fingers closed around Drumknott's sex and began to stroke him.

Whatever he saw--probably a funny face, Drumknott thought later--he must have liked it. He smiled crookedly, privately. The smile and the force of those eyes watching him worked Drumknott as surely as Havelock's fingers did, and in a very little while he was helplessly gasping as his seed spilled.

He lay for some time with his mind gone white as new vellum, dimly aware of being wiped clean with the end of his robe. Havelock kept fondling him, soft surveying journeys around the curve of his buttocks and the point of his elbow. Drumknott was tipsy with it like a teetotaller on one glass of wine. He'd known only efficient, self-administered relief for so long that he'd half forgotten there could be more to it.

It had undoubtedly been even longer for Havelock. Five years, ten? Twenty? As long as he'd been Patrician, Drumknott suspected, if not longer. He pressed his hand to Havelock's chest, fingers splayed, and--imagining how dizzying it must feel--began to move it in slow sweeps.

"It's all right," Havelock said, edging away.

Drumknott followed. "I want to please you."

"There's no need." His unsteady voice belied him, and when Drumknott reached lower he found an incipient bulge. "Really." Havelock pulled his hand up and held it, lightly but definitely.

"But -"

"Shhhh." Havelock's fingertips started doing something intricate along the lines of his palm

Drumknott surrendered and lay quiet. When Havelock had had enough of this play with his reactions, then they could continue. It was just a matter of waiting, and Drumknott knew how to wait for him. Meanwhile, this was delicious. Intoxicating. Finally warm enough, a heavy contentment between his legs, being touched and listening to Havelock's breathing.

Some time later he awoke to an empty bed. Havelock had moved the candle to his writing desk, where he sat frowning at a page and tapping the feather end of his pen against his cheek. He wrote a little, paused, wrote some more, and went back to tapping. It must be something more complicated than everyday business, where he never sought long for a word.

When Drumknott sat muzzily up, Havelock only glanced at him. He'd put his cap back on, Drumknott noticed. And Wuffles lay in his basket beside the desk.

Even once his flies were done up and his robe rearranged around him, Drumknott felt dishevelled and vaguely disadvantaged. He walked over to the desk, trying to flatten the bit of his hair at the top that always went spiky when he slept. "What ti-?" was all he managed before a yawn seized him.

"It's not quite three in the morning, if that's what you were asking. You can get a little more sleep."

"That's good." Candlelight picked out the lines around Havelock's eyes more deeply than sunlight ever did. Drumknott wanted to kiss him there. Or start there, anyway. "You should rest too."

"I am resting. I'm quite all right, Rufus." He smiled, absently. The pen was still in his hand. "Go on. I'll see you in the morning."

There was no doubt what bed Drumknott was meant to spend the rest of the night in. He picked up his boots, which stood neatly by the door. At some point Havelock must have put them there, out of the way. "Good night," he said, and slipped out into the corridor, shutting the door before he could hear whether Havelock answered him or not.

***

The next day was absolutely ordinary. Drumknott had slept in the end, despite vaguely feeling that he should turn up for work bleary-eyed and fragile. That was what people did in novels, but in novels no one ever seemed to have responsibilities beyond swooning through the garden picking symbolic flowers. And perhaps Drumknott was just made less sensitively than he ought to be, but he found escaping his own feelings for a few hours preferable to wallowing in them.

His Lordship was already in the office when Drumknott arrived just before seven with tea, the _Times_, the overnight clacks, and the appointments diary. "Ah, Drumknott, good morning. I have a list of books I need from the university library. Send a messenger over, please, with my compliments and a basket of fruit for the Librarian."

It was steadying, after a fashion. He'd never wanted to disrupt Lord Vetinari's work or put him out of kilter. Quite the opposite. But that evening, when after a day of impeccable courtesy His Lordship sent him away at the usual hour of nine o'clock, dismay crept up like one of those noxious mists off the Ankh. Something ought to have changed a little. He ought to have made more of a difference than that.

A small crisis (a groom on the embassy staff in Quirm had befriended grooms from the Quirmian cavalry, been let onto the regimental grounds for some late-night drinking, gone off to use the privy and been discovered in the armoury taking notes and iconographs) led to a string of long days with no time to think. Drumknott worked through one Octeday without even noticing, and by the time the next one arrived his head hurt from lack of sleep, his hand hurt from writing letters too secret to entrust to Reavish, and his mind hurt from the tortuosities of diplomatic phrasing and special ciphers. Lord Vetinari insisted he take the day off and promised to relax a little himself. ("Since the matter is now largely resolved, I shall not hesitate to follow your very frank advice as soon as I've written to Lady Margolotta, who has some questions about the embassy staff in Bonk.")

Drumknott went back to bed until nearly noon, then went out in his best suit, which he'd had made up from the fine black worsted Tobias and Jane had given him last Hogswatch. He liked the chance to give it an airing: with its close-fitting frock coat and long trousers it was a little modern for around the palace, and wasted under a clerk's robe anyway. Naturally he had gone to the Oblong Office on the way out to see if His Lordship needed anything. Persuasion had many aspects besides the verbal, and the sort of tailoring that made a somewhat meagre man taller and squarer at the shoulders was an honourable branch of the tree of rhetoric. His Lordship had certainly _looked_, even if his only response had been to raise an eyebrow.

By the time Drumknott had recovered from the thrill of his own audacity, he was outside the palace gates with no very clear idea where to go. He could have dropped in on Tobias and Jane, who always made him welcome even when he wasn't expected, but they'd ask questions he could neither answer truthfully nor bear lying about. What he wanted most was solitude and some undemanding distractions. He'd never been a direct thinker like His Lordship; in fact he thought best when he wasn't trying to think at all. If he let matters lie undisturbed, then perhaps an idea would eventually rise to the surface of his mind like . . . like an unfortunate metaphor.

He walked aimlessly through the expensive commercial district that fanned out from Broad Way, discovered that Sator Square was empty of its usual roast-chestnut sellers (and indeed almost everyone), and ate beef in wine sauce for lunch at an overelaborate restaurant near the Merchants' Guildhall. The vast new book shop on Medlar Row, which had outraged its competitors by keeping late hours and opening on Octeday, was as crowded as Sator Square was deserted; even the chestnut vendors had set up on the street outside. Drumknott got his toes trodden on by an old lady with a deceptively sweet face and hobnailed boots, but secured a copy of Valentine Gandy's latest novel, _The History of Aahil, the Most Noble and Philosophical Pirate of Klatch, Wherein Is Contained Much Incident to Delight and Instruct the Young Person in Perseverance Before the Vagaries of Fortune_. Since he was usually too tired to read more than a page before bed, it ought to last him about two years. He took it to a coffeehouse to make a start.

By a quarter to seven the young Prince Aahil, not yet a pirate, had been enslaved by the rebels who'd murdered his family, the coffeehouse was closing, and Drumknott had begun feeling rather lonely. It would have been nice to have company. A friend. There were two or three fellows at the palace he talked to about trivial things, and a couple of girls who flirted with him however little encouragement he gave, but no one he'd call a friend by any strict definition.

It wouldn't take _too_ much definitional expansion to count His Lordship, just some allowance for inequality of rank and . . . other complications. Not that they'd ever sit here together over coffee dregs and laugh at the improbably euphuistic speech Aahil had made in the middle of a swordfight. Nor, at this rate, would they talk about the real and serious concerns Drumknott had been guarding his mind against all day, and for a dozen days before that.

Well, at least he had Tobias and Jane, even if he couldn't talk to them about everything either. He was still more fortunate than His Lordship, all alone but for a distant aunt and a dog who probably wouldn't survive another year.

Out on the cold street again, already missing the coffeehouse's fire, Drumknott contemplated returning to the cold palace and found himself uneager. Perhaps he could go to the theatre or the opera. But he'd been silent among strangers all day. He wanted something friendlier. _Friendly_ wasn't friendship any more than scenic postcards were art, but the postcard shop was a lot easier to find than the galleries. He'd used to like the Shepherd Lad tavern, though he hadn't been in years. People went there to talk, mostly--it wasn't like the Blue Cat Club--and he was bound to meet some sympathetic man he needn't worry about shocking. He could give a false name, pretend he was a guild clerk or a schoolteacher, disguise enough details that he could safely relate what had happened between him and Havelock until, perhaps, he saw how it had gone wrong.

He could, if he valued His Lordship's trust less than a postcard.

He'd kept His Lordship's secrets for years, and now he had deeper ones, not the mysteries of state but the mysteries of the man. They weren't his to give away just because they touched him too. His Lordship would certainly never babble them out in a lonely mood, if he even had such things; he must be used to keeping his own counsel. He'd done it for such a long time.

Drumknott walked slowly back towards Broad Way, thinking.

***

The Quirmian crisis was eventually buried six feet deep in diplomacy and tamped down hard; with luck, it would neither rise again nor come to the keen noses at the _Times_. Drumknott's working day returned to its usual fourteen hours, and His Lordship started leaving the office again on those errands whose purpose hadn't grown much clearer now that Drumknott was included. Dropping in unexpectedly at the Royal Bank and the Mint he could understand, but why waste an hour taking tea with a banker's wife afterwards? Why visit a perfectly ordinary clacks tower or a dwarf metal refinery experimenting with bauxite ores? On one occasion they hadn't even gone anywhere, just been driven along the Ankh while His Lordship frowned silently at the ice-bound barges.

There were reasons; Drumknott never doubted that. When it came to bringing together loose threads of happenstance into a spider-web of purpose, the gods had nothing on Lord Vetinari.

In most cases. It began to seem that the thing that had happened between them would stay just that: a thing that had happened. A thread dangling in the air forever, connecting to nothing. His Lordship still hadn't mentioned it, let alone touched him or shown any other sign of wanting it to recur. Drumknott thought of taking action himself--he lay awake planning strategies and reading Nasus's _The Art of Getting Your End Away_ and other such unhelpful books--but it had a look of painful futility, like walking into a locked door twice. He could make what had happened happen again, perhaps, but he couldn't see a way to make it happen _differently_.

The thing about Lord Vetinari's plans was that they were as invisible as spider-webs until you were in them. One night at about seven o'clock, after a day of concerted labour and no break for the crossword puzzle, Lord Vetinari put his pen down with the kind of nonchalance that implied a good deal of hidden chalance. "I believe our work is finished for today."

"It is, sir?" It was true they'd got through everything that couldn't wait, but that ordinarily meant making a start on tomorrow's work.

"I believe so," he repeated. His expression shed a few layers of impassivity, like a glacier on a warm day. "Rufus, will you come to bed?"

Drumknott had nearly said _yes_ out of sheer astonishment--he had the shape of the word on his tongue--when the obscure map of his discontent came clear at last. The problem was _here_, and the solution was _there_, and a single way led from one to the other. One route, and not a safe or certain one.

He thought of Lord Vetinari travelling under the sea to Leshp, offering a surrender in Klatch, waiting in prison to see if he'd reckoned the odds well enough. If Ankh-Morpork would survive, and if he would.

"I had thought it was a simple question," His Lordship said.

"It's not, my lord." Drumknott set a hand on the edge of the desk to steady himself. He took a deep breath and threw the dice. "Or rather, the answer's not simple. I'll gladly come to Havelock Vetinari's bed, if he wants me. But I will not lie down with my master the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Not again."

"That," His Lordship said, as slowly as if he had to invent new words to do it, "is the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said to me. And it has a good deal of competition."

"It's the truth, sir. When -"

"You make it sound as if I . . . but it was you who . . . and I thought . . ." He shut his mouth hard, trapping the wandering sentence. "I gave you pleasure. I took nothing for myself."

"That's true. And you didn't let me give you anything, either. You wanted nothing, you needed nothing. You were untouchable."

"That is a perverse interpretation."

"I don't think so, sir. Who is more powerful than the man who needs nothing?"

"That's . . . no, it's not nonsense. It's true in most circumstances. But in this case you have misunderstood."

"I don't think I have. I . . . I know you. Better than anyone else does, at least." Drumknott only realised he'd paused for a denial when one didn't come. "You're the best ruler this city's ever had because you take nothing for yourself. Because you rule yourself. But . . . I don't know why, but you're a despot to yourself. Everything's an exercise of power--the sleepless nights, the meals you don't eat, this freezing cold office. If you could, you'd live on tea and paperwork."

"I would certainly get a lot more done if that were possible."

"You're not a machine for getting things done. You're a man of flesh and blood. And you're in a kind of prison. You built it up around yourself, your own prisoner and your own gaoler. But now you've lost the key."

"I suppose that you, knowing me as you do, have discovered it?"

"Possibly. I should very much like to find out."

In silence, His Lordship capped the inkwell and rearranged the objects on his desk into a more orderly order. "You read novels, don't you, Rufus?"

"Ye-es."

"I thought so." He nodded, confirming something to himself. "What is it that you want of me, exactly?"

The question, however unyieldingly phrased, was at least a question and not a refusal. Drumknott breathed through his strangling hope and said, "To touch you."

"Ah." His Lordship nudged a paperweight fractionally to the right. "I had an excellent rhetorical education, you know. I can recognise figures of speech. I even remember all their names; that one was antanaclasis." He got up and went to the window; unasked, Drumknott came after him and stood at his side. "If all you wanted was the literal, the matter would be simpler."

"We could start with the literal." Drumknott raised his hand to the window and touched the other man's reflected face. "And see what follows."

There was a long pause. Drumknott waited to see if the island would sink.

A hand brushed his, the fingers slightly warmer than the glass. "I can make no promises."

"I know."

"Then will you come to bed?"

Drumknott looked from the mirrored face to the real one. "Yes, Havelock."

Havelock didn't smile--it wasn't, somehow, a moment for smiling--but the set of his mouth softened. "Come along, then." He went not to the double doors that led to the anteroom, but to a spot along an inner wall. "I want to show you something." He pulled aside the edge of a worn tapestry. "There's a flaw in the wood here, do you see it? Press it hard, and then find the latch here -" he reached up to an almost-invisible join between two oak panels "and pull down. Always in that order." A panel slid back. Drumknott trailed him into a narrow, dusty passageway, trying to memorise a stream of instructions. "Stay along the left wall here . . . that board's unworn for a reason, don't ever step on it . . . since it's between noon and midnight, touch this bit of moulding twice . . . when you're four steps up, go back one and wait five seconds . . ." They arrived at what seemed to be a featureless bit of wall; Havelock pointed out a shallow depression in the plaster. "A handspan and a half above that--my hands, not yours--there's a spot to press. When you hear a click, then . . . yes." There was a keyhole where there hadn't been anything before. Havelock drew a key from somewhere in the depths of his robe and turned it twice. "I'll give you a key, but always knock first anyway if I'm in the room. There are other defences that I engage from the inside." He pushed the door open and they went into the bedroom.

"Good gods," Drumknott said.

The room was _warm_. Heaped coals glowed in the fireplace, and the scuttle was full to overflowing--easily a night's worth. Perhaps in case that wasn't sufficient, the bed had been moved nearer the fire. But the really extraordinary thing was that it was a different bed, wide enough for two. It was covered with a coarse wool blanket--no room Havelock lived in would ever be luxurious--but there were two plump pillows where before there'd been a single limp one.

"Yes, I thought you might like it."

"Thank you," Drumknott said. It was a gift, another bestowal of pleasure, like the way Havelock had touched him. And yet not exactly a repetition, because Havelock couldn't hold back from his own share of this.

"You're most welcome." Havelock set a candle down on the small chest at the head of the bed. "Perhaps we could light a few more, if you don't mind? I find that I rather like to . . . "

_To see_, Drumknott thought. The one desire he'd indulged, last time, and still he could barely speak of it. "Of course I don't mind." He moved a couple of tall pillar candles closer to the bed and lit them, then locked the room's unsecret door. "Is the housemaid going to - ?"

"I told Miss Furlotte not to come back after seven o'clock."

That would certainly start the servants guessing, if the bed and the fire hadn't done already. And they weren't likely to guess wrong.

Havelock answered his look--or read his mind--with a shrug. "So long as it doesn't end up in the _Times_, I'm not terribly concerned. To most of the city it will be merely another rumour, and far from the most interesting."

"And to the rest?" Some of His Lordship's enemies could distil a dram of truth from a tun of gossip with unfortunate facility.

"It will be a tool to use against me. We must ensure that they don't find the task an easy one. I fear you've taken your last solitary walk through the city, Rufus."

"I think," he answered, ignoring a twinge of unmerited nostalgia for those walks, "it's a price that isn't beyond my means." He'd be a little more constrained; Havelock, he hoped, a little more free.

Havelock smiled, and he smiled back. He let the moment stretch taut, holding Havelock's gaze, and opened the top clasp of his robe. He bared himself to the candlelight and the warm air, wondering if Havelock had hoped for this when he ordered the fire built up.

By the time Drumknott had removed robe and coat and neckcloth and was unbuttoning his shirt, he felt himself growing shy. By the breeches he knew he was bright red, but he kept on. Gift for gift, trust for trust. He even managed not to cup his hands over his sex, although he had to fold them behind his back to keep the resolution.

"Rufus . . . " Havelock took a step towards him, his heavy robe stirring the air; Drumknott felt it on his naked skin.

"Would you let me see you, too?"

"Oh. Yes. Of course." He wrenched at the neck of his robe. It wasn't so much the haste of eagerness, Drumknott thought, as the haste of someone trying to get it over with.

"May I?" Drumknott moved Havelock's hands aside.

Havelock seemed to look through him for a moment, then said, "Yes, if you like."

Drumknott set his mind to buttons and points, clear little problems for his nervousness to work itself out on. Outer robe, inner robe, long shirt and braies and old-fashioned wool hosen, and a thin austere body underneath it all. Blue veins and black hair. The scar on Havelock's thigh, as jagged and white as the Ramtops on a map. So many bones announcing themselves under his skin. His chest belling out in an indrawn breath every time Drumknott touched him.

"Thank you," Drumknott said when everything was off, and didn't wait for an answer before stretching up to kiss him.

At first it was just like their previous kiss: closed lips on closed lips, and Havelock not exactly joining in the spirit of the venture. Drumknott persisted, trying to let it build. Like writing, he thought, one word follows the next until it feels natural, until the sentence was always there and could never have been any different. He remembered the best kisses he'd ever known (the man who'd given them had been the one wonderful part of that Ephebian holiday) and adapted them--a little slower, a little less vehement, moving lightly, careful to encourage and not insist.

Eventually Havelock's mouth moved against his a little, pressed back a little. When the kiss ended, he didn't pull away from Drumknott's hand on his shoulder. "That was rather more . . . pleasant than I recalled. And not so messy."

Messy? Kissing was messy, Drumknott supposed, if you stopped to think about it. Someone else's mouth, tongue, teeth, saliva--revolting if considered too closely. But no one who was enjoying a kiss stopped to think. Whomever Havelock had kissed before, Drumknott concluded, hadn't deserved the privilege. "I'm glad," he said, and eased a hand round to Havelock's back, to the linked bones that stood out like knots in a whip. "Would you like to do it again?"

Without more than a few seconds' thought, Havelock kissed him, half imitation and half experiment. Drumknott felt him testing, discarding what he didn't like--anything too deep, too messy--and elaborating what he did, building variations on brushing, nibbling, light sucking, delicate movements of the tongue. He grew almost eloquent and Drumknott grew hard, pressed aching against Havelock's leg.

"Bed?" he asked, a slurred whisper.

"An excellent idea."

They pulled aside the blanket and lay on the old linen sheet, soft from a hundred washings; Havelock's asceticism had circled accidentally back and become sensuality. It was like the stern, close-clipped beard Drumknott had always wanted to feel against his skin, the precise fingers he'd always wanted to taste. He tasted them now, kissing from wrist to fingertip and drawing them into his mouth one by one. Havelock's eyes squeezed shut in what Drumknott decided, from his arrhythmic breathing, must be pleasure. Afterwards, Drumknott wiped each finger dry with the frayed edge of the sheet.

From Havelock's face and his fingers, Drumknott crept downwards, touching his arms and neck, his shoulders, his chest, stopping to kiss and be kissed, fighting the urgency that grew as Havelock touched him much less chastely. At last he slid the flat of his hand down Havelock's belly and along the widening patch of rough hair to his sex. Havelock gasped, his whole body jerking. He'd been half stiff already, and his member swelled in Drumknott's encircling hand. His face contorted and his shoulders strained at every movement.

Drumknott had thought to take Havelock's sex in his mouth, but now, seeing that slow self-abandonment, he wanted to stay face-to-face. He remembered something else he'd learnt in Ephebe. Still lying on his side, he guided Havelock's sex between his thighs. His own organ was squeezed and rubbed between their bodies as Havelock cautiously thrust.

"Is this -"

"Yes," he said, and pulled Havelock's hips roughly against his own.

Sensations flared in him like sparks, bright and brief--the tickling of the hair on his coillons, the random spasms of Havelock's hand, the wordless sounds they both made, the blue flicker as Havelock's eyes closed and opened and closed again. They were kissing wetly, _messily_, mouths slipping. A sudden expanding tension pulled him irrevocably to climax, and he jerked his hips clumsily, his sex pulsing in sharp exquisite bursts.

Havelock groaned and pushed him onto his back, rolling on top of him. Misty-headed, sated, Drumknott clung as Havelock's whole body pushed at him, face buried in his neck, hips snapping. It almost hurt, too much now for his oversensitive skin, but he'd wanted this desire. He moved with it, whispering word-fragments in Havelock's ear as he shuddered, as the rhythm broke in a hot spurt between Drumknott's legs.

For a minute or two Havelock lay spread over him, as loose and warm as a blanket, then seemed to remember himself little by little. The fist clenched in Drumknott's hair opened into fingers, petting him apologetically. With a sigh, Havelock reached past him, fumbling for something in the bedside chest. He produced two handkerchiefs, gave one to Drumknott, and slid aside onto the mattress. They mopped themselves off in worrisome silence. It was hard to tell what Havelock was thinking; harder, strangely enough, in the bedroom than in the office.

He touched a strand of Havelock's damp, rumpled hair, and when that was accepted, set about rumpling it some more. "Was that . . . ?"

"It was pleasurable. Intensely so."

"But did you _like_ it?"

An eyebrow twitched. "Have you let me out of prison, is that what you mean?"

"I suppose so." He looked away from those knowing eyes.

"Rufus. My dear boy." Havelock clasped his arm lightly, just above the elbow. "There are only prisons. We sit in our cells all our lives wishing for freedom, and when at last the key turns in the lock, we are taken out to face the hangman."

"That's horrible."

"Yes." He smiled, but the melancholy was visible in it, palimpsestic. "That does not make it any less true." With a fingertip, he traced the small scar on Drumknott's shoulder. "Igor did an excellent job. Does it give you much pain?"

"Very little. I was lucky." Drumknott laid his hand on Havelock's thigh, where it didn't quite cover the long, rippling scar. There were odd lumps and twists under the skin, distortions of the muscle. No wonder it troubled him. "How many times have people tried to kill you?"

"Eight, to my knowledge. That discounts some rather innovative school pranks, innumerable deposition plots, a strange illness I'm still uncertain about, a treason charge, and the time in my youth when Mr. Dibbler attempted to sell me a sausage."

Drumknott leaned in until he could feel Havelock's exhalations on his own face.

"Is that why you . . . approached me?" Havelock asked.

"It's not the _reason_, no. But it is why I spoke. I hadn't thought I ever would."

"Ah. The timing seemed too close to be coincidental."

"I thought you might die there in the Watch House. Alone. You deserve better than that, and I thought I might - gods, I am monstrously vain."

Beyond all expectation, Havelock embraced him. "Humility is an overvalued virtue." He gave Drumknott a tentative kiss; it still seemed a foreign language to him, hard to pronounce and grammatically thorny. "But if I died this minute, I would die alone. That is the nature of dying."

Drumknott felt a future desolation stretch back its long, cold arm and beckon. "I suppose you're right." He closed his eyes and tried to feel every inch of his body against Havelock's, all at once.

"I'm sorry. I did warn you that I'm not a kind man."

"Do you think I need kindness so badly? You're an honest man."

"Really? You're the only person who has ever thought that of me."

Drumknott ran a hand along Havelock's naked back. "I have a very particular point of view on the matter."

Havelock laughed, quick and surprised. "Yes, indeed. Let me tell you this then, in honesty. I said there are only prisons, and I meant it. But this cell of mine is more comfortable now. Larger, if you will."

"Warmer."

"Antanaclasis again. But yes, both literally and figuratively. And I am not displeased with the change."

***

Drumknott woke alone once more. Havelock had covered him with the blanket and blown out most of the candles. In the near-absolute silence of deep night he could hear the scratch of a pen that needed trimming. He wrapped the blanket around himself--the fire was still burning, but lower than before--and went to the desk, laying a hand on Havelock's shoulder. Interrupting him at work felt slightly like a liberty, but here in this room he reckoned he was allowed them.

Havelock leaned, slightly but unmistakably, into his touch. "Do you know what I'm writing?"

The coded journal lay on the desk, half covered by a bunch of loose, closely-written leaves. "No," said Drumknott.

"It's a treatise on governance. For my successor." He crossed out one word and inserted another. "The problem with tyranny as a profession is that one cannot take an apprentice. The next Patrician will have no experience of rule. But there are two things he will have, I hope: this book, and you."

"In what sense -"

"The secretarial only." He smiled sideways at Drumknott. "The other, I leave to your discretion." A few more words took shape on the page. "I don't want my city broken by unskilled hands. And in the course of nature, you will outlive me." Turning in the chair, he looked up, unsmiling now, intent. "As you yourself have said, you know me. You know what I've done to build order and security in Ankh-Morpork. Will you teach him?"

The weight of it, as heavy as the city itself, loured on his shoulders. He wanted to refuse it. He wanted to say _don't talk about dying_. But he was Havelock Vetinari's man, and there was only one answer he could give, or ever had. "Yes."

"Thank you," Havelock said, in a quiet voice that thrummed down into Drumknott's bones. After another long look, he began writing again.

Such endless labour, for a time after his death, for a city that wouldn't thank him. Drumknott watched him for a moment, then asked, "Should I go?" Let him write in peace, if he felt the need.

"Hmm? No, not unless you wish it. I'm - give me a second - there." He pushed hard on a full stop. "I want to sleep a little myself, and I should like your company."

"Then you shall have it," Drumknott said, holding out a hand. "Come to bed."

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Halotolerant for beta-reading and Britpicking.


End file.
